Seeker! Ken Campbell His Five Amazing Lives is the second biography of my hero Ken Campbell to appear. Merrifield was a friend and collaborator of Campbell’s, so his book has a more intimate rapport with its subject than Michael Coveney’s The Great Caper did. Merrifield GETS Campbell better.

Unfortunately, he’s in bad need of an editor, so that although his book is more in-depth, a good part of its bulk is made up of repetition and meandering. But it was great to get the inside track on Schlatzer’s Bouquet, a production I saw, written by JM, and which doesn’t rate a mention in the Coveney. Still nothing about Memories of Amnesia, though. Did anyone else see that one?

The productions I wish I’d seen are obviously Illuminatus! and The Warp (which played Edinburgh — I can remember the posters — but I was too little then), but his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with Chris Langham as Arthur Dent, the audience pushed around the theatre on a hovercraft, and a flat set painted red and green so that when you put on your tinted glasses it pops out into 3D — that must have been quite something.

Both books are essential for the True Seeker, although artistically Nina Conti’s moving, hilarious documentary Her Master’s Voice is the finest of the Campbell tributes. What’s great is that there’s so little overlap: I think maybe the only story used in both bios is the one about Campbell and friends descending in an elevator.

“Quick, on the floor!” orders Campbell, and they all lie down with their legs up in the air.

Ground floor: the doors slide open before startled onlookers.

“Well, that came down at a hell of a lick!” says Campbell.

***

I thought I’d gotten hold of all Richard Hughes books, and read two of the four, but then I’m in a Stockbridge charity shop and I find The Spider’s Palace. Remarkable that the author of A High Wind in Jamaica (strikingly filmed by Alexander Mackendrick), which has a rather leery view of childhood, should have written children’s fiction — a book of fairy tales from 1931 that seems to anticipate the iconoclastic absurdity of The Goon Show.

In Living in W’ales, the first story, a little girl and a labrador move into a whale, like Jonah and Pinocchio before them, but find the lack of food and bedding a problem…

Meanwhile the whale began to get rather worried about them. He had swallowed them without thinking much about it; but he soon began to wonder what was happening to them, and whether they were comfortable. He knew nothing at all about little girls. He thought she would probably want something to eat by now, but he didn’t know at all what. So he tried to talk down into his own inside, to ask her. But that is very difficult: at any rate he couldn’t do it. The words all came out instead of going in.

A friendly parrot creates a speaking tube out of a snake with the ends snipped off, and the whale interviews his intestinal tenant. The tube also allows him to feed her rice pudding. But then the little girl asks for a bed.

‘She wants a bed,’ the whale said to the parrot.

‘You go to Harrods for that,” said the parrot, “which is the biggest shop in London,’ and flew away.

When the whale got to Harrods, he went inside. One of the shopwalkers came up to him and said, ‘What can I do for you, please?’ which sounded very silly.

‘I want a bed,’ said the whale.

Mr Binks The Bed Man came up and looked rather worried.

‘I don’t know if have got a bed that will exactly fit you, sir,’ he said.

‘Why not, silly?’ said the whale. ‘I only want an ordinary one.’

‘Yes sir,’ said the Bed Man, ‘but it will have to be rather a large ordinary one, won’t it?’

‘Of course not, silly,’ said the whale. ‘On the contrary, it will have to be rather a small one.’

I like this because of the stilted formality, childishness, and the fact that it really makes you picture a whale in Harrods. It’s like the Goons in that it creates word-concepts that recoil from visual imagining.

From As They Were Driving:

‘Now,’ they said, ‘we are not afraid of the Stones, even if they do attack us: the Curious Brothers, and the Spotted Mother and Child, and the Fossil Brothers, and the Plain Brothers, and Mrs Mogany, and the Fierce Man Moffadyke, and all.’

Maybe not, but I’m terrified of them, just by their names. “I can picture all of them,” said Fiona. The book might be too scary for our flimsy modern children. Children in the 30s were made entirely out of snot and knee-scabs, so they could handle anything. Even WWII. In The Gardener and the White Elephants the aged gardener has to fight a vicious rabbit to the death — he throttles it with his bare hands. And in The Man With A Green Face, we get this ~

Nightmare fuel. But, on a lighter note, from Nothing ~

‘Good gracious!’ she said, ‘what a mess these children do leave on the table, to be sure!’

‘What have they left on the table?’ called the cook from the kitchen.

‘Well, there’s a drop of milk,’ said the maid.

‘That’s not so much to make a fuss about,’ said the cook.

‘There’s also a dead Chinaman,’ said the maid.

‘Never mind,’ said the cook, ‘it might be worse. Has he just died, or was he always dead?’

‘I think,’ said the maid, ‘he was born dead, and was dead when he was a little boy, and finally grew up dead.’

‘What else is there?’ asked the cook.

‘There’s a tooth, and I think it has dropped out of some passing shark.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said the cook, ‘children are that rampageous!’

‘There is also,’ said the maid, pulling up the blind and looking at the table more carefully, ‘unless I am much mistaken, a live Chinaman.’

‘Tut-tut!’ said the cook; ‘what a fuss you do make. And was he always alive?’

‘I don’t know.’

***

Next to this, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, a parody of the Gothic school written by an actual friend of Shelley’s, seems positively staid, but it does have a couple of good laughs, and the blend of philosophy and bedroom farce is unusual.

He seems to be smiling, but really he’s just pushing one side of his face up with his knuckles. It’s the manly version of Lillian Gish in BROKEN BLOSSOMS.

Among the many interesting things about Bogart, his paralysed upper lip may not feature highly, but it’s in there somewhere. According to various conflicting stories, Bogie suffered some kind of injury to his mouth while serving in the Navy — one version has him getting hit by shrapnel in a U-boat attack (but the dates don’t work — this was two weeks after the armistice!); the alternative has him being smashed in the face by a manacled prisoner he was transporting; the truth may well be less glamorous still — and the result was the lishp and the stiff upper lip.

The lishp, fortunately, was of the Sean Connery variety rather than something more Karloffian, which might have hindered Bogart in hith tough guy roleth, but it was probably more hindrance than help anyway. The paralysed lip, however, may have been in some ways a boon.

Actor/director/inspirational demon Ken Campbell, in his studies of the art and science of ventriloquism, observed that certain South Seas islanders, when going to war, intimidate their enemies with displays of vocalization sans lip movement. So there’s something inherently threatening and dangerous about communicating verbally through a rigid mouth-slot. Which explains a lot of the feelings I always had about Shari Lewis.

Here’s a trailer for a new movie looking at Ken Campbell’s ventriloquial pupil and heir ~

Anyhow, what I’m saying is that possibly Bogart’s air of controlled menace was enhanced by his facial disability (I mean, the lip, I don’t mean his homely face, although that obviously helped too). There’s something more powerful about a character who exerts intimidation without seeming to try. It has to be inherent.

There was a TV show called In at the Deep End in which the presenters had to perform a new, unusual task each week, and one time the task was to play a movie villain. So he went to speak to Oliver Reed. Which was very interesting, because Ollie was sober, which wasn’t his usual style for interviews. And he was in tutelary mode, which was also a surprise — rarely can you find Ollie talking about his craft. Outside of this conversation, I can only recall one quote where he talked about the importance of growing real facial hair, “because it moves with your face,” rather than having a fake bushel spirit-gummed onto the old chin.

“I’m known as the sound man’s enemy,” said Reed, “Because I speak so softly. Dangerous men don’t shout, only loudmouths shout.”

Understatement again. It’s relatively easy for stage-trained actors to adjust their volume for the cinema, but adjusting facial movement takes a little longer — it’s possible that British actors trained to enunciate make less effective screen tough guys than American actors who often have less of a theatrical background, having come straight from Schwabs. Brits often get cast as villains, because they sound effete and intelligent to American ears, but they’re less likely to be manly heroes. But that might be changing — a new generation of British actors have started turning up in American film and TV with a mastery of dialect that seems not to have existed in the days of either James Mason or Bob Hoskins, and their ability to not only sound American but act American is impressive indeed. But will any of them make it to full movie stardom, or what passes for it today?